Leadership Abuses?

[Dullyanna]

I feel a little stupid about this, but how exactly is leadership all that abuseable? This feels like a 'Why does the samurai class suck" kind of question, but I just can't see anything blatantly cheesy about the feat.

[Azerian Kelimon]

Blatantly, nothing. Implicitly, a wizard cohort. Or a druid cohort. Or a full spellcasting class cohort. Or a multiple bard party buffing the followers till they look like epic level freaks.

[leperkhaun]

If each person in the group takes leadership you can basically double the size of your party.

As the other person pointed out, wizard support, heal bots, buff bots, magic item craft bots.

A wizard for example could go with you and batman, or craft all your magic items for super cheap, then when it gets wish....free +5 to all stats.

[adanedhel9]

There is an abusable Leadership combo that I've heard of. I don't have the books that this is in, and it's been a while since I've seen it, so I don't remember the exact details. But supposedly there's a way to get a draconic cohort who's higher level than you. Who could then pull off the same trick and get another cohort that's even a higher level. Repeat ad nauseum.

[Rad]

I heard of another with an elf race with a CHA bonus. Basically you get one of those (a venerable one, for another +3 CHA) as your 6th level follower (NOT cohort). There is a max level for followers but there is none on cohorts. Staying in the racial average for CHA this elf can get leadership himself and get 6th level followers (but only a 4th level cohort due to the limitation) ant that;s going to be another one of the same kind...
repeat and get an army with the lower level followers, plus your cohort.

[Armads]

There is an abusable Leadership combo that I've heard of. I don't have the books that this is in, and it's been a while since I've seen it, so I don't remember the exact details. But supposedly there's a way to get a draconic cohort who's higher level than you. Who could then pull off the same trick and get another cohort that's even a higher level. Repeat ad nauseum.

You get a dragonwrought kobold, which is a dragon. Then you get that kobold to take Dragon Cohort. And so on and so forth.

[Kaelik]

Leadership is an abuse because you cohort is 2 levels lower then you. Even ignoring everything else that the feat may grant, such a pair of characters is of one higher CR according to the DMG then your single character was. If you take Leadership you are effectively increasing your ECL by one. Only better because you can tailor that character to do whatever you want.

[Bender]

Or a multiple bard party buffing the followers till they look like epic level freaks.
multiple bard buffs don't work

[KoDT69]

Yah, if Bard buffs stacked like that, it would be very abusable vesry fast. A party of 8 Bards would be cool that way! Disguised as a "rock band" of their times!

So I have a few very high level characters converted from 2nd edition that could abuse this badly. 3 of them are level 80-83. In 2nd edition it was not that hard to play a character for 5-10 years because the higher levels had diminishing returns. One had 150+ 2e levels converted to 80 in 3.5, one had 125 down to 81, then one was 103 down to 83. The 81 and 80 have very very high CHA scores.

Look at it this way Leadership + Legendary Commander = Level 78 Cohort and boatloads of lower levels. Just incrementing down to say level 30 you have 25 cohorts all with Legendary Commander as well. So then +24 +23 +22 etc. Then you factor in the peons high enough level to take even just Leadership. If I get bored today I'll have to make an excel document to figure it all out. I'm guessing with a 50 CHA on the highest main character it could easily make up an empire of devoted warriors.

Luckily for the former DM of my characters I ignored that ability altogether. I took the feats but never even rolled the cohort, just assumed him a faceless warchief that keeps tabs on the lowbies, sending them out to do good in my style :smallsmile: It's much easier on the DM's world that way! :smallamused: